unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc

Humans are creatures of habit. We have habits for talking, eating, walking, sleeping–we don’t question these habits; much of it happens on autopilot. But it’s through art and philosophy that allows us to take a step back from those habits and examine them in a meaningful way.This is the argument that Alva Noë, professor of philosophy at UC Berkeley, makes in his book The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are. He’s also written a number of books that tackle philosophical questions surrounding how humans interact with the world, like Action in Perception and Learning to Look: Dispatches from the Art World. Alva and Greg discuss how art and philosophy help us break free from the habits we’re saddled with, what’s really happening in the brain when we deem something “aesthetic,” and what it means to truly see the world. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Philosophy and life are entangled19:49: I think philosophy happens throughout our lives. It happens not only in the law, it happens in the laboratory, and it probably happens in your discussions with your partner at the dinner table sometimes. Art [and] philosophy is a moment in our thought processes. So, in a way, I want to say that there is all the difference in the world between business as usual and the work of philosophy and art. But outside in the wild of our lives, whether our legal lives, our political lives, our social lives, our family lives, there’s lots of opportunities for art and philosophy.There is no STEM without art and philosophy06:23: Art and philosophy are really important, and they are important in ways that the popular ideas in our civilization at the moment about the preeminence of science, technology, engineering, and math, this kind of STEM worldview really misses the point. There is no STEM without art and philosophy.Language isn't an automatic thing that we do following the rules blindly38:39: To be a language user is to have resources for coping with problems that arise in the course of that activity: misunderstandings, needs for clarifications, demands for repetitions, or justifications. So, to be a speaker is not just to do this kind of automatic thing. It's to be able to reflect on what we're doing. So, the ability to reflect is presupposed at the ground level. See, this is why I want to resist the hierarchy idea because there are two levels. There's the use of language, and there's the reflection about language. But it turns out that the ability to be a user of language presupposes that you're also able to reflect on language.Great philosophers start debates13:36: What makes a philosopher a great philosopher? Not that they landed on the truth, and we all know it, but rather that they started a debate that we're still having. That's what greatness is. So, as a philosopher, I'm very interested in what is the value of these non-utilitarian things that are so important to us. Why are they so important to us? And, that's where I want to say, actually, they are opportunities for us to finally grow and change and not just be trapped by the habits of culture, by the ways of doing things.Show Links:Recommended Resources:James BaldwinSeeing Through Clothes by Anne HollanderJohn RuskinP.F. StrawsonRoy HarrisHubert DreyfusIan HackingGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at UC Berkeley Alva Noë on WebsiteAlva Noë on LinkedInAlva Noë on TwitterAlva Noë on Talks at GoogleHis Work:The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We AreStrange Tools: Art and Human Nature Action in PerceptionOut of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of ConsciousnessLearning to Look: Dispatches from the Art WorldInfinite Baseball: Notes from a Philosopher at the Ballpark Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What if we haven’t unlocked the true potential of our senses because we simply don't pay enough attention to them? Writer and filmmaker Jackie Higgins explores human senses by comparing them to their animal counterparts in her book Sentient: How Animals Illuminate the Wonder of Our Human Senses. Spoiler alert: Human senses are far more powerful than we give them credit for, and there’s a lot more than just five. Jackie and Greg discuss how culture impacts the way we perceive the world, examples of animals that have similar senses to ours, and certain case studies that show how humans could refine their senses to be much more powerful than previously thought.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:On the two types of touch19:34: I split touch into two types of touch, two big headings of touch. One of them is the discriminative touch. This idea that you take a walnut and roll it around in your hand. And you can feel its roughness, and you can feel the corrugations, and you can feel the size of it, and you can feel the curves. And if you perhaps put it in your pocket, you can feel your fingers being stretched, the skin being stretched by it. Different senses for discriminative touch will be involved in that. But, there is another sense of touch called affective or emotional touch. And I was expecting touch to be quite a pedestrian story. I thought I knew a lot about touch, and I was completely blown away by how little we know about touch.Culture's influence on perception04:02: If your language and culture imbue a certain way to perceive the world, that's as important as the senses in our bodies firing and sending information to our brain.Do we take our senses for granted until we lose them?40:54: Our brain is scooting off in other directions. We're rarely present in the sensory information that the world is giving us at that moment in time...And that was part of the message of the book, which is when you take time, time out. I think if we take time out and focus on these senses, they'll surprise you.The relationship between our brain and smell perception10:21: Neuroscientists looking at smell would say that the brain is the place where we may have far fewer receptors, a little bit like the shrimp tail; it's a kind of echo of that. But studies have been done on how good we are at fine-dividing sense, recognizing sense, and following sense. Some scientists at your university had some students stand on their knees following a string dipped in chocolate to see how good they were at being dogs, so they were remarkably good. And we have fewer senses, but yes, our brain—there are very many areas in our brain that are dedicated to figuring out and creating smell perceptions.Show Links:Recommended Resources:The Darkness Manifesto: On Light Pollution, Night Ecology, and the Ancient Rhythms that Sustain Life by Johan EklöfSelig HechtHelen KellerEşref ArmağanJoseph KirschvinkWhat Is It Like to Be a BatGuest Profile:Author’s Profile on Pan MacmillianJackie Higgins WebsiteJackie Higgins on XHer Work:Sentient: How Animals Illuminate the Wonder of Our Human SensesArticle on Interalia Magazine Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Can you imagine the brain's intricate dance that helps us maintain balance? How does this process connect with vertigo, cognitive decline, and even our emotions and decision-making?Paul Thagard is a professor emeritus at the University of Waterloo and the author of several books. His latest release is titled Balance: How It Works and What It Means, and next year his new book, Falsehoods Fly: Why Misinformation Spreads and How to Stop It, will be published.Paul and Greg discuss Paul’s research into the brain and the way it handles certain tasks. Paul sheds light on how balance and nausea are linked and also how misinformation commonly weaves its way into our knowledge base. Learn about the surprising links between vertigo and nausea as he explains how our brains influence our lives in nuanced ways.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Cognition and emotion are constantly integrated19:09: So, the idea that cognition and emotion are separate in the brain is all wrong. They're constantly integrated, and it's a really good thing because it means that the perceptions that we're doing, the predictions that we're making, the explanations we're coming up, are all tied with the explanations of current ways in which our situation is relevant to our goals. So emotion, instead of just being something that somehow gets in the way of cognition or is extraneous to it, is actually tightly integrated with it, and that's one of the great powers of the human brain.Is balance conscious?10:32: Balance is mostly unconscious because almost all the things you do, when you're walking down the street or even just sitting in front of a TV, doesn't involve thinking about it. But when consciousness becomes important, balance breaks.Misinformation is a major issue in everyday life58:19: In decision-making and ethics in general, empathy is really important—that is, you've got to be able to put yourself in somebody else's shoes and figure out why they're feeling the way they are. But the solution for this isn't just courses in critical thinking—I never thought of my book on misinformation as being a critical thinking textbook. It's not a textbook at all. But it's a book that I hope will make it clear to people that all these problems of information and misinformation are major issues in everyday life.Is there something wrong with the way that economists talk about goals?48:45: The economist's way of talking about goals is just ridiculous. But they think of values as preferences. Well, where do preferences come from? Preferences come from goals and emotions. And so the fundamental idea here is that goals and emotions and preferences are derivative.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Integrated information theoryBroadcasting TheoriesSemantic pointer competition vs. information integrationHow to Build a Brain: A Neural Architecture for Biological Cognition (Oxford Series on Cognitive Models and Architectures) Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at University of WaterlooPaul Thagard's WebsitePaul Thagard on LinkedInHis Work:Falsehoods Fly: Why Misinformation Spreads and How to Stop ItPaul Thagard Amazon Author PageBalance: How It Works and What It MeansBots and Beasts: What Makes Machines, Animals, and People Smart?Mind-Society: From Brains to Social Sciences and ProfessionsNatural Philosophy: From Social Brains to Knowledge, Reality, Morality, and BeautyThe Brain and the Meaning of LifeHot Thought: Mechanisms And Applications of Emotional CognitionGoogle Scholar ArticlesPsychology Today Articles Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Where does the concept of rules originate from? And how does that history inform the rules we use to organize society today? Lorraine Daston is the director emerita at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and a professor at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought. Her book, Rules: A Short History of What We Live By, takes a wide-encompassing view of rules throughout history, going all the way back to ancient Greek and Roman times. Lorraine and Greg discuss thick vs. thin rules, how recipes are some of the oldest forms of rules and the important and complicated role judgment and equity play in the system of rules and laws.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Do people perceive paradigms and rules as inconsistent?30:27: I think paradigms and models suffer from one problem, which is a political problem, which is the suspicion that discretion inevitably means either favoritism or corruption in the political domain. In the domain of knowledge, they suffer from being foggy. Nobody can explain how we think in terms of models and paradigms. We do it all the time. Our life would be impossible if we did not do it. So we know that we can do it, but we can't explain how we do it. And that makes the philosophically minded profoundly uncomfortable. Why are recipes an important genre in the history of knowledge?09:41: Recipes are amongst the oldest and most mobile of knowledge genres that we know. If you want a genre that travels across continents, centuries, and classes and breaks down the barriers between men and women, it's recipes.Thick vs. thin rules19:23: The thick rules are rules that anticipate a high degree of variability and unforeseen circumstances. So they come upholstered even in their articulation with caveats, examples, and exceptions. They warn you that you're going to have to use your judgment in applying these rules…[20:09] The thin rule, on the other hand, is short, usually short, peremptory, and imperative, and it does not anticipate exceptions. This is a rule which is made for a world which is predictable and uniform.Judgment straddles into two categories46:50: The problem is that we divide our world into the objective and the subjective, but judgment straddles those two categories. It's possible to give reasons—good reasons, bad reasons, and arguments—for why one judgment should prevail over another. And if we don't exercise that faculty, like any other faculty, atrophy. And my fear is that because judgment discretion is the faculty that dare not speak its name, we are in danger of becoming judgmentally flabby.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Nicolas Bourbaki Thomas KuhnThe Wealth of Nations by Adam SmithPascal’s Provincial LettersCritique of Judgment by Immanuel KantGuest Profile:Professional Profile at Max Planck Institute for the History of ScienceProfessional Profile at University of Chicago’s Committee on Social ThoughtHer Work:Rules: A Short History of What We Live ByAgainst Nature (Untimely Meditations) Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Simon Johnson, MIT professor, discusses the impact of past technological disruptions and the current landscape of disruptive technology and AI. He explores the distribution of benefits, the effects on professions like accounting, challenges of finding skilled labor in urban areas, and the breakdown of post-war economic stability. Johnson also emphasizes the role of vision and political power, the tradeoff between profitability and social value for tech companies like Facebook, and the need to change business school curriculum to address inequality.

The history of money isn’t just an Economics story, but it’s a cultural and philosophical one, too. Felix Martin, a columnist for Reuters, charts this history in his book, Money: The Unauthorized Biography – From Coinage to Cryptocurrencies, and argues that money as a social institution has always been wielded as a political instrument. Felix and Greg discuss the determining factors of money’s value, some of the key moments in the history of currency, and what could be done to improve modern financial banking systems.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Money as a credit relationship21:08: There is this great value in thinking about money as a credit relationship. And the real value is to think about two dimensions. One dimension is the creditworthiness of the issuer…[21:52] And another dimension I think conceptually, you can think of them as different. Some people like to think of them the same, but I think the difference is the liquidity question. Creditworthiness is about this bilateral relationship between you and the central bank. And then there's this question of how many other people in the network will accept this in payment of goods or services? And that's this sort of liquidity question. And, so these are two factors which are behind that. They're all subsumed under this (V) in the Fisher equation, but you can break them down a bit conceptually, I think, in terms of money as credit is useful to do that.Money is a social institution04:02: I believe that money is a social institution, a communal fiction, then a history of money is not a history of coins and notes and that kind of thing. It's an intellectual history. It's a history of these ideas and these institutions and where they come from.What is the whole point of banking?52:00: The whole point of banking and its historical origin is precisely the flexibility of the balance sheets of the banks. The whole way that the capitalist economy works, what is useful about banks and the reason they exist is precisely that they are able to expand and contract their balance sheets in line with the needs of trade.Theories around money are useful but contingent18:22: It's not that the Fisher equation or the quantity theory of money are not useful. All these theories of money are very useful for interpreting and predicting given points in time. But they are contingent.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah HarariJohn LockeThe Nature of Money by Geoffrey InghamWalter BagehotEcu de marcGuest Profile:Author Page at ReutersFelix Martin’s WebsiteFelix Martin on LinkedInFeliz Martin on XHis Work:Money: The Unauthorized Biography – From Coinage to CryptocurrenciesArticles on Financial TimesArticles on Muck Rack Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Jedediah Purdy, professor of Law at Duke Law and author, discusses America's environmental laws, the tension between preserving nature for human benefit and its mystical allure, and the role of class in environmental politics. They also explore the different visions of nature, the historical roots of sustainability, the limitations of common law in addressing environmental issues, the paradox of our political moment, faith in government, and the concept of standing in environmental politics.

Humans, as a species, are unique among the animal kingdom in a number of ways, but several of those involve how we have and raise our children. In a class of our own, even compared to other primates, humans spend an extremely long time in childhood and even longer until all parts of us, including our bones, fully mature.Brenna Hassett is a biological anthropologist and archaeologist. She is also the author of two books, Built on Bones: 15,000 Years of Urban Life and Death and her latest book, Growing Up Human: The Evolution of Childhood.Brenna and Greg discuss the significant impact of cultural adaptations on reproduction, exploring the complexities of human birth and the uniqueness of human fertility. Brenna goes over the hurdles of breastfeeding in diverse societies, the sway of nutrition in modern societies and its tie to fertility cycles, and what unexpected correlation humans have to zebras.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The perfect parenting myth16:03: The idea that there is one true way to parent is insidious because it preys on every insecurity you have as a new parent, which is, "Oh my God, this machine that I have purchased from the store and brought home is glitching. I can't turn it off and on again; there is no helpline that is working. What on earth am I supposed to do?" And a lot of people look for answers in a sort of imagined past where, if the phone wasn't ringing off the hook, if the television wasn't on, if you didn't have to go back to work after three weeks or something, childrearing would be much easier. And a lot of that stuff is true.Are babies demanding?25:48: If you think about the signaling mechanism in a human pregnancy being much more baby-led than maternal-led, I think you start to see how our very demanding babies can take advantage of that.The challenges of balancing work and care34:44: The thing to remember with humans is that every single evolutionary adaptation that we've made, we have adjusted the levers of the adaptation with our culture. Our culture is essentially another mechanism by which we move our adaptations forward, backward, sideways, or whatever. So if you think about something that ought to be straightforward, like birth, and then you look at the actual mechanics of it for humans.The push for adulthood in our changing world47:47: We've set up a society that had some expectations and a culture that had some expectations, and then we changed them, and we are slowly allowing some people in our society to fit our changed expectations. We are pushing our expectations absolutely to their limit in some ways. And that's why fertility treatment and things like that are so important now, because people are waiting longer; it is harder to meet the sort of traditional adult milestones in the economy we have today.Show Links:Recommended Resources:r/K selection theoryCountess BáthoryThe Dutch Hunger WinterHolly DunsworthGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at UCLANBrenna Hassett on XBrenna Hassett on Talks at GoogleHer Work:Growing Up Human: The Evolution of ChildhoodBuilt on Bones: 15,000 Years of Urban Life and DeathSapiens.org ArticlesResearchGate PublicationsOther scholarly articles Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Adrian Johns, Professor of History at the University of Chicago, discusses the problems with measuring literacy levels and the history of literacy panics. They also explore the impact of technologies like eye movement cameras on fields like marketing and user interface work.

Even well before the suffragettes of the 19th century, women had been writing, thinking, and pushing for equal rights for almost a hundred years. How did those early feminist activists inform policy and the way we view household and family politics today? Erika Bachiochi is a fellow at the Ethics & Public Policy Center and a senior fellow at the Abigail Adams Institute. Her new book, The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision, provides an intellectual history of the women’s rights movement going all the way back to the 18th century. She and Greg discuss the influential work of Mary Wollstonecraft on the women’s rights movement, how industrialization and the rise of capitalism shifted priorities in the movement, and the history of the abortion debate. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The effect of technology in reproduction37:43: What answers asymmetry now, what answers the fact that men and women can engage in sex but women get pregnant and men don't, is technology. So, you have contraception and you have abortion, and when technology fills in the gaps, again, you have this shift, so that's when you see the sexual revolution come about: more sexual risk-taking, more sort of casual sex as a sexual ethos that kind of takes over because we're relying now on technology instead of our development of self-mastery in the sexual realm.The big shift in the women's right movement19:28: With industrialization and the rise of capitalism, women started to become far more dependent, where they used to work together on the agrarian homestead. That dependency puts them at great risk because they now depend on men for a paycheck. So it's not just women's ambition that sent them into the workplace; it's a real desire to have some insurance against male vice in a lot of ways, which is what you saw in that first wave of feminism.The challenges of balancing work and care52:32: We need to listen more to those who would prefer to be in the home and prefer to be caring for their children, who would prefer to see the work of the home that both mothers and fathers engage in as having great value, as getting back to the Wilson crafting insight as kind, kind of underlying every social, political, and economic good. And that we've forgotten about that. And thinking about what children really need to become independent and mature—not only workers, not only citizens, but also spouses and neighbors—is a really important shift that needs to happen.On Ginsburg's fight for women's equality14:43: By really fighting for women to be understood as equal citizens, Ginsburg is constitutionalizing Wilson's craft's principle. What Ginsburg is fighting against in the 1970s as an advocate for the ACLU is that we shouldn't have these laws that basically confine women to maternity and expect that just because a woman has the capacity for childbirth and motherhood, she should be kept out of professions. And that was a really important gain and a really important underlying political philosophy.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Mary WollstonecraftA Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary WollstonecraftEdmund BurkeJean-Jacques RousseauJohn LockeCommentaries on the Laws of England by Sir William BlackstoneAlice PaulLochner v. New YorkVictoria WoodhullThe National Organization for Women’s 1966 Statement of PurposeWhy Women Still Can’t Have It All by Anne-Marie SlaughterWomen and Economics by Charlotte Perkins GillmanMary Ann GlendonGuest Profile:Professional Profile at Ethics & Public Policy CenterContributor’s Profile on The Federalist Society Erika Bachiochi on LinkedInErika Bachiochi on XErika Bachiochi on TED TalkHer Work:The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost VisionThe Cost of Choice: Women Evaluate the Impact of Abortion Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.